Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The “hybrid fleet” is today’s reality: organizations diversify operating systems while Microsoft Active Directory (AD) remains the dominant identity “source of truth.” IT administrators must ensure Linux machines, like Ubuntu desktops and servers, behave as first-class citizens in this environment.

All it takes to make critical applications to fail, customer portals to crash, and render internal systems inaccessible is just one expired client secret. Not a sophisticated cyberattack. Not a worldwide cloud service outage. Just a single credential that quietly expired while everyone focused on "more important" things. Is secret expiry that big of a concern? Chances are great that enterprise-scale organizations have at least one expired credential in production right now.

If there’s one thing every IT leader can agree on, it’s this: Manual Active Directory (AD) management never ends. There’s always one more access request, one more approval chain, and one more audit reminder flashing on your screen. By the time you’ve closed your last ticket of the day, there’s already another one waiting. For many teams, 2025 became the year of “we’ll automate next quarter.” But next quarter came and went without any automation.

Across vast enterprise networks, Active Directory (AD) serves as the foundational layer for identity and access management. It's the critical service enabling user authentication, managing authorizations, and ensuring smooth operations across your network. Given its central role, any hiccup in AD can lead to widespread outages, security vulnerabilities, or frustrating user experiences.

Entra ID is the new name for Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), Microsoft’s cloud-based identity and access management service. This rebranding, announced in July 2023, is part of Microsoft’s broader Entra product family, which focuses on securing access to digital resources and managing identities in a comprehensive way.

In the world of technology, there are a near infinite number of moving parts, network configurations, Active Directory, users getting added to and removed from groups, data, security and so much more. Trying to keep an eye on all of this can be a genuine headache, so let’s take a look at some ways we can log Active Directory changes with NinjaOne to give you a little bit more breathing room!

Let’s dive into the world of Objective Monitors in the context of Active Directory (AD) servers and explore why monitoring them using DX Unified Infrastructure Management (UIM) is crucial.